Washington [71]
Washington could never have married a poor woman, but neither could he have tolerated a cold and loveless marriage.
Throughout his life Washington was noticeably attracted to women, but his steely willpower and stern discipline likely overmastered any fugitive impulses to stray. Many people observed his gallantry with the ladies. One British officer described how women left his dining room after meals only to be squired right back in by Washington. As he recalled, Washington introduced “a round of ladies as soon as the cloth was removed by saying he had always a very great esteem for the ladies and therefore drank them in preference to anything else.”22 In corresponding with women, Washington frequently slipped into a breezily flirtatious tone. When the widow Annis Boudinot Stockton later sent him an ode in his honor, he encouraged her to produce more poetry: “You see, madam, when once the woman has tempted us and we have tasted the forbidden fruit, there is no such thing as checking our appetites, whatever the consequences may be.”23
In a century of sterling wits, George Washington never stood out for his humor, but he had a bawdy streak and relished hearty, masculine jokes. In the 1920s the puritanical J. P. Morgan, Jr., destroyed some letters by Washington that he owned, claiming they were “smutty.”24 When breeding animals, Washington wrote about their couplings with dry, facetious mirth. In the 1780s, after the Spanish king sent him a male donkey nicknamed Royal Gift, he launched an experiment in breeding mules. Washington noted drolly that the donkey was at first indifferent to “female allurements” and that when he finally responded, he proceeded with “deliberation and majestic solemnity to the work of procreation.”25 At the same time he hoped Royal Gift would catch the democratic spirit in America and “that when he becomes a little better acquainted with republican enjoyments, he will amend his manners and fall into a better and more expeditious mode of doing business.”26
Perhaps the earthiest comment Washington ever made about sex occurred when he learned of the marriage of forty-seven-year-old Colonel Joseph Ward. He seemed to find forty-seven a comically advanced age for matrimony. “I am glad to hear that my old acquaintance Colo. Ward is yet under the influence of vigorous passions,” he told a correspondent. He supposed that Ward, “like a prudent general,” had “reviewed his strength, his arms, and ammunition before he got involved in an action. But if these have been neglected . . . let me advise him to make the first onset upon his fair del Tobosa [Dulcinea del Toboso, the country girl in Don Quixote] with vigor that the impression may be deep, if it cannot be lasting or frequently renewed.”27
The marriage thrived even though Martha and George lacked children. Many theories have been advanced to explain this barren marriage. Martha may have sustained injury during the birth of Patsy, her final child, making additional births impossible. Some scholars have speculated that George’s early bout of smallpox or some other disease left him infertile. We know that George Washington didn’t think he was sterile, because, in writing once to a nephew, he stated that if Martha died and he remarried, he “probably” wouldn’t have children, but only because he would marry a woman suitable to his age—obviously implying that he could have children with a younger woman.28 The historic stress on the childless marriage has obscured the fact that the Washingtons, far from being lonely, were always surrounded by children. In the early years at Mount Vernon, there were Jacky and Patsy Custis and then, in later years, two of Jacky’s children, plus assorted other young relatives, perhaps numbering a dozen orphaned youngsters in all. This childless couple ran a household teeming with high-spirited children, which may have been their way of filling a perceived void.
Later on Washington’s childless state helped him to assume the title of Father of His Country. That he wasn’t a